Bravo Lima Oscar Golf.

LIKE A TINY HELICOPTER. A BUMBLEBEE IN BARNES LAST SATURDAY

A bumblebee in the woods, hovering an inch or two
above the ground, landing, taking off again. The turbulence from its
wings is so strong, it displaces the earth underneath and makes small
pieces of dry wood fly up in the air.

14 July 2011

NATURE

This morning, while cycling to the computer fair,
I came across a strangely spectacular scene: in the middle of the
street, a big seagull was pecking a bloody pigeon carcass
before deciding to drag it to the side of the street for more leisurely
pecking. A couple of not-dead-yet pigeons were loitering nearby,
looking disinterested.

And right now I'm on a train from London to Penzance, looking out
of the window, counting rabbits. A while ago we passed a green patch
that was full of black rabbits! I was hoping for more, but all the other
ones I've seen since have just been normal rabbit-colour. I wonder
if the black ones were all members of one particular mutated family.
The Black Rabbits of Totnes.

18 June 2011

ART

My show at Prick Your Finger is now officially
finished (I'm taking it down tonight). Last Saturday when I was in the
shop all day, supposedly to knit a cactus but really mainly to drink tea
and hang out with friends, Gareth and his son Tom came round. Tom is 6
years old, or 6 years and 3 quarters to be precise, and he made this
beautiful drawing of my show. Thank you Tom! I particularly like the
furry coat of the creature on the left, and the fact that you can see
the donkey's sack full of dollars under the table.

And this lovely picture was taken by Rachael Matthews, one of the
two wonderful ladies who run Prick Your Finger. It shows Friend (a
knitted black creature that I got for my birthday from Andrea Voisey)
and Mrs. G (Prick Your Finger's resident tea lady) being quite close to
each other. You can read more about them here.

18 April 2011.

A REVIEW OF MY BIRTHDAY

Recently I celebrated my birthday at the Horse
Hospital. A lot of people turned up, and I had a great time.
I made a couple of charts to document what a success the party was,
so I can always look back at them to remind myself of that special
day. I must say I am quite pleased with my phenomenal PowerPoint
skills!

17 April 2011.

FILMS ONLINE!

I have put two of my films online. You can visit my vimeo page to watch them.

10 April 2011.

BURRO DE CHANGE

My show BURRO DE CHANGE is still on at Prick Your Finger.
Today Saturday 9th and next week Saturday 16th April I will be there
all day knitting a cactus. Drop by if you have a chance! The very kind
ladies at Prick Your Finger blogged about me too!

09 April 2011.

THE TERROR OF THE DALEKS

We went wandering around Charlotte Street tonight and
we came across a Dalek in somebody's ground floor window. A real proper
big shiny Dalek. Strangely, it was not in the least scary. But then,
honestly, how can something be scary if it looks like it was designed to
make cake batter with one hand and clean toilets with the other?

08 Febuary [sic] 2011.

FOR CHARLES HARRISON??

Last night I went to Karsten Schubert gallery for the opening of For Charles Harrison: When attitudes became form, a collaborative exhibition by Richard Saltoun and Karsten Schubert "adapting the premise of Harrison's seminal exhibition When Attitudes Become Form (ICA, London, 1969)" (quoted from the press release). It was also the book launch of Ridinghouse's Charles Harrison Looking Back.
At first glance, there was everything you could wish for at an art
opening: good art, some of it great, free drinks including champagne,
and lots of famous people including Sir Nicholas Serota. (I said to my
partner, "Do you think Nick Serota is a bat?" He asked why I would think
that, and I said, "Because there's a bat called Serotine bat." —
"Why don't you ask him?" — Well, I was too shy to ask, and so I still
don't know if Nick Serota is a bat. If you know, please send me an
email.)

But then I picked up a list of works to find out what I was looking
at, and I found something on it that I was really excited about: No. 5,
Art & Language, Map of 36 square mile area of the Pacific Ocean west of Oahu,
1967, letterpress print on paper, 63 x 52 cm. I had only seen it
reproduced in books before, and it is a wonderful work which references
the sea chart in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. There
were 26 works in the show, and with all of them being displayed in no
particular order, it took me a while to find it: incomprehensibly, it
was not in one of the two gallery rooms, but sitting on the floor in the
corner of the office, next to the door that leads to the toilets,
underneath a rather bad work by Mark Wallinger that wasn't itself part
of the show. It looked like they had forgotten to hang it. And there
wasn't a number 5 next to it on the wall either, so it really didn't
look intentional. My partner pointed out Richard Saltoun to me, the
curator, and we both started (admittedly slightly drunkenly) to
apprehend him: why on earth was this piece leaning against the wall in
the corner, and not part of the show, when according to the list of
works it clearly should be? Mr. Saltoun looked very slightly embarrassed
for a second and then told us in a jovial and facetious manner
(inbetween meeting and greeting people constantly) that he thought Art
& Language were not really that interesting compared to the other
artists in the show, and that you could always go to the Lisson if you
wanted to see Art & Language.

Wait a minute. The title of the show was WHAT again, exactly? FOR CHARLES HARRISON?

I thought this was shameful, terrible, a travesty. We left the
gallery, for they had run out of drinks, and continued drinking
elsewhere until we were very drunk.

13 January 2011.

BOOKARTBOOKSHOP

Very exciting news! From today, a selection of my books is available from
bookartbookshop in Pitfield Street off Old Street in London. My
books and handprinted postcards are presented on a custom-made POS
(Point of Sale) which
looks so imposing that you can't really miss it.

Posted 3 December 2010.

APOLOGIES TO MICK HUCKNALL

The Guardian website informs me of "Mick Hucknall apologies to thousands of women he slept with".
I salute this noble sentiment and would like to take this
opportunity to send my heartfelt, sincere apologies to Mick Hucknall for
not sleeping with him. I know I probably hurt his feelings, and I am
deeply sorry.

Posted 3 December 2010.

TERMINOLOGY ON YAHOO. AN OBSERVATION

When I visited the yahoo website the other day, the very top line
of text that appeared was: 'Trending: Leslie Nielsen'. Oh, trending, is
he?! And there's me thinking he's dead! Hahaha! — This morning, I
couldn't help but notice that trend is more transitory than death:
Leslie Nielsen is still dead, but the trendy thing now is Tokyo Earthquake.

Posted 30 November 2010.

BOOKARTBOOKSHOP, SUKI CHAN, ART & LANGUAGE

Yesterday I went to Bookartbookshop in Pitfield Street to show
Tanya, the owner, my books — and I am pleased to announce that very soon
my books will be available to buy there. On the way back home I made a
little detour to look at some art. First I went to Tintype Gallery in
Redchurch Street, where I recently saw Serena Korda doing a closing
performance for her show: she and her sister did a puppet show of Walt
Disney and a lady mountaineer whose name I forgot, a woman who allegedly
climbed a mountain top on her own several times but failed to verify
it. The show was charmingly amateurish in the way it was performed — a
bit like children act out scenes with dolls — and yet at the same time
it was obviously very carefully planned, with a beautiful soundtrack,
and the way it was using a cupboard as the setting (with little scenes
and landscapes built inside and a mountain on top of it) was really
good. The new show there is Suki Chan, who I hadn't heard of until I
watched some TV programme the other night in which Saatchi finds the
next superstar and she gets to be among the six chosen ones — handpicked
by a panel including Tracey Emin and some annoying art history dude who
makes really boring comments — who get to make some new work in
Saatchi's East London studio. The programme was pretty repulsive. We
watched up to the point where the six chosen ones get to go to Hastings
and are paired up to be inspired by different sites in Hastings to make
some sort of big sculptural work, with the condition that it has to be
"accessible". To add insult to injury, Saatchi's assistant (because he
himself never shows up, of course) brings Martin Creed with her to have a
go at all the artists that they don't do the kind of work that he would
do. His advice to them, predictably, is to make things simpler. He
slags off one duo's plan to build "ghost houses" next to fishermen's
huts, in the space where according to photographic evidence they found
there used to be two more of those huts. I thought their idea was very
good, but Martin Creed doesn't get it and therefore thinks it's
pointless and rubbish. Nobody challenges him on the pointlessness of his
own art, which this reviewer finds rather vacuous.

Anyway, we stopped watching at that point. The Tintype show has
several photographs, some of them with text written by the artist about
the specific location (including places in Beijing, Mongolia, London,
Berlin). There is a sort of documentary approach mixed with something
very personal, her texts are her own observations and thoughts about
places and people. Then there are five television sets next to each
other, all simultaneously playing different films. I concentrated on the
first one, and it was sometimes difficult to understand the dialogue in
it as the film next to it picked up in volume (there are no headphones,
so you get the soundtrack of all the films getting mixed up). The films
were all about rice, and I think they were made to be shown on
television; the one I watched showed various people in China being
interviewed about what rice means to them, and again, like in the
photographs, it was a documentary with a very personal touch, with
people telling anecdotes of eating rice, or growing their own rice, or
how a huge amount of people starved to death under Mao when they
abandoned farming in favour of trying to compete with the steel industry
abroad. One scene I particularly liked was when a young woman talks
about how she injured herself as a child, falling on her chin, and she
mimes how then she had to eat rice barely being able to move her jaw,
and the camera starts shaking as the camerawoman starts laughing at her
story. At first I thought it was a bit annoying that there were no
headphones, as I sometimes found it impossible to hear what was said,
but then, I liked how it worked as a whole, with the different screens
showing people being interviewed alongside landscapes and people in rice
fields, and the mixed up soundtracks created an atmosphere that would
have been absent if they had all been on headphones. Next to this,
slightly inexplicably, was a mirror shelf with hardcover books cut in
half, so the spines were facing the viewer and the cut–off sides were
reflected in the mirror on the wall. Then a huge film still from a film
shot in London at night, and next to it the film itself, a big elongated
plasma screen with two films playing alongside, with two pairs of
headphones (I think with one soundtrack, not two different ones). The
film is basically a night journey in London, including scenes filmed
from the front window of the tube, with the train driver talking about
his work, which is not recorded to be the main focus, it's hard to
understand everything he says as it is mixed with other sounds. It is
beautiful and a bit eerie, and odd to see very familiar scenes filmed by
someone else, for example streets like London Wall where I've cycled a
few times and marvelled at the glossy inhumanity of some of the
architecture, and the public art that does nothing for the public, or
that 'artwork' made up of dozens of traffic lights on a traffic island
somewhere east that my partner always rants about when we drive past
there, as it's not only quite pointless but also potentially dangerous
for drivers. The next piece in the show, which I initially missed until
the very nice gallery assistant pointed it out, was a little animation
projected into a corner high up on the wall, which was beautifully done,
it had a line of text made up in neon light and then was switched off
word by word. The other two pieces were neon signs, one was English text
going in a circle, done in a handwriting style, with words that (I
guess) people had said to the artist about rice, like "boring" or
"white", the other was a line of text in Chinese, which also looked very
much like handwritten characters, and the gallery assistant read out
the translation to me, it was also a quote about rice. Overall I thought
that maybe it would be a stronger show if it had focussed only on the
works about rice, rather than mixing it with the London pieces, but then
again, all the work is very good so I was happy to see it. Funnily
enough, my partner had similar reservations about Serena Korda's show,
saying that she was a bit young to have a retrospective and it might
have been better to be more focussed.

Then I went to Karsten Schubert gallery as I found out they have a
new group show which includes a piece by Art & Language. The piece
is called One Year, it is from 2005, and I found it very clever
(OK, that goes without saying) and utterly hilarious. It consists of
twelve framed images, they are all photographs and each of them has one
person photoshopped or collaged into it (I don't actually know or care
about the exact process of how these were made) and painted over — the
photos are of various surroundings like art museums or galleries, one
space which has a map of New York including Ground Zero on the floor and
pictures of terrorists on the wall (not sure where that is, I assume it
is an art piece), another one is a photo of a big rave. The person
"photoshopped" into the image is standing, sitting or kneeling in the
middle of it in a gesture of theatrical despair, utter disbelief and
comical rage. I thought the people were the artists themselves but as I
didn't know what they look like, I checked with one of the ladies
working there, and she confirmed that they were indeed Mel Ramsden and
Michael Baldwin. She said that supposedly one of them was of Charles
Harrison but she wasn't sure which one. I couldn't make it out either
and I guessed it was the one where you see someone photographed from
above, i.e. you just see the back of his head.

Posted 20 November 2010.

Lords of Chaos

I've been reading Lords of Chaos (published by Feral House)
for several months now. To be more precise, I started reading it several
months ago, got quite far pretty quick, then could not bear to read any
more and put it away for a long time. I picked it up again last week
and chances are I will actually finish it this time.

I was initially interested in the book because a few years back we
had an exhibition at the Horse Hospital of Peter Beste's photographs of
the Norwegian Black Metal scene which was very fascinating, particularly
one photograph which had a guy in corpsepaint posing for the camera in a
suburban-looking street, while an older woman walks past giving him
suspicious looks, which showed in an instant how the people in this
scene are worlds removed from the reality they live in, how sad and
pedestrian the life is that makes people attempt to live life on the
edge by turning to Black Metal, and how this attempted escape is itself
rather pathetic.

I borrowed the book from a friend, after another
friend had told me how "hilarious" it was, and to begin with I found it
very interesting, as I knew hardly anything at all about Black Metal. It
starts off with a history of how Black Metal evolved, then goes into
the grisly details of the murderous friendship of Count Grishnack / Varg
Vikernes and Euronymous, and various people around them. Where the book
kind of lost me was when the authors attempt to connect more or less
isolated events of racist / homophobic / arsonist attacks on people and
churches and conjure up some kind of global conspiracy, making the whole
thing into some glorious anti-Christian movement which supposedly will
gather more pace and more members over the years and continue to spread
mayhem, chaos and murder to overthrow the wrongful Christian rule over
Europe. Interesting as it is to read about all the bands involved in
this scene, it's difficult to take the book seriously when it gives
completely insignificant stupid boys from stupid provincial bands a
platform to spread their racist, white supremacy bollocks; about
half-way through the book it gets really boring, as nothing is added by
printing yet more interviews with confused stupid men who if they
weren't completely deluded would easily recognise just by looking in the
mirror that they themselves are great proof that their theory of the
supremacy of white man is incorrect.

I get the feeling that the
people in the scene who have burned churches or killed people think of
themselves as some sort of amazing evil creature from Lord of the Rings
or the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but the reality is that their lives
are probably rather unglamorous, seeing as they tend to end up in
prison.

Overall, the book is well worth reading if like myself you
knew nothing about the Black Metal scene; but as my friend warned me
when I borrowed it, it is cryptofascist, which if you're that way
inclined might make you worse, but if you aren't you're more likely to
just get a bit bored. Also I must say that reading it — despite the
authors' desperate attempt to blow up some cases of arson and murder
into an apocalyptic movement of global proportions — destroys the myth
created by Peter Beste's photographs: even though they show the pathetic
element of it all, they convey something grandiose. The music itself
does that too. The real-life stories don't.

And this is what Mumra thinks of Lords of Chaos.

Posted 17 November 2010.

THINGS by Keith Wilson, 12-22 October 2010 at Wellcome Collection

The Wellcome Collection is currently showing an exhibition by Keith
Wilson entitled "Things". You can go in and drop off a thing and it
will become part of the show. It is organised like a big calendar, so
each thing is assigned a date, and it will be complete when there are
365 things in it. I went in today to drop off a thing — after some
deliberation (about 1 minute!) I decided to hand in my cat-in-a-box,
a little screenprinted cat based on my real cat Mumra, which is placed
inside a wooden box with a glass front, and to make it less like a cat
in a box and more like a cat in its own living room I put some Liberty's
patterned fabric on the walls and I cut out a small reproduction of a
Black Cat fireworks ad on the wall, so the cat has a cat poster.

Initially I intended to give it as a loan, but when I handed it in
to Keith Wilson, he asked whether I'd consider giving it as a gift
instead. I asked if it would end up being thrown away, and he assured me
that on the contrary, it would be part of the collection which after
the Wellcome show would go on to travel to different places to be
exhibited with all the other gifted things. So I said yes, because the
box itself was assembled for an exhibition two years ago and since then
it's just been sitting on a shelf at home gathering dust. I am attached
to it in some way, and I liked having it around, but I wasn't planning
to exhibit it ever again, so it felt like it had served its original
purpose and was in a kind of undead state where it was still hanging
around but pointlessly hidden away at the back of a shelf. So I was
really happy to pass it on to someone else's collection which is
actually going to be seen by people. I was also very happy to have taken
it out of its normal context, where it was surrounded by old toys and
objects, and giving it a new world to exist in where it has a new
meaning, surrounded by all sorts of things that other people have chosen
to give. I asked Keith how many things were given as gifts and how many
as loans, and he said it was about one third to two thirds - one third
gifts, two third loans. I am assuming this means that as the collection
travels to other places, local people will fill the boxes that are empty
because its contents have been returned to their owners, making it a
different collection every time.

I think it's a beautiful idea. I like it better than Michael
Landy's Art Bin, where people were invited to contribute a failed
artwork and throw it into a huge bin, exhibited for a while and then
destroyed afterwards — although I thoroughly agree with destroying
failed artworks, but I think I can do that myself if I want to and I
don't see that much point in making it part of somebody else's artwork
in the process. But contributing to Keith Wilson's show, giving
something away and thereby not only making more space in the flat but at
the same time giving an almost-forgotten thing a new purpose, made me
happy.

The private view will be on Tuesday 19 October, if you contribute a
thing to the show, you will be invited! (You can bring things on Sunday
17 and Tuesday 19 October.) The link is here: Wellcome website

Posted 16 October 2010.

BERLIN TRIP

I went to Berlin at the end of March with a group of Kingston
University graphic design students and two of their tutors, Cathy and
Mark (I am a visiting lecturer there, teaching basic bookbinding). It
was great fun, in a very busy sort of way, we were visiting design
studios, galleries and museums every day and met lots of interesting and
inspiring people. One visit that was particularly interesting (for me
at least, not sure what the students made of it!) was going to see
Catriona Shaw a.k.a. Miss Le Bomb in her studio. I didn't know her
before but was very intrigued by the things she's put on her website, as
she's done such a variety of things including drawing, singing in a
band, making videos, doing performances on her own and with other
people. She talked to us about her experience of moving to Germany
(she's from Scotland), what it's like living in Berlin etc., and also
told us a bit about the performance she was going to do at a gallery the
next evening. She said it would include a powerpoint presentation, a
bad talk about architecture, and various other things. We all went to
the gallery the next day, it was fairly small and completely packed —
and there she was with her friend, both dressed in tight golden catsuits
looking very glamorous, and they did about half an hour of a rather
baffling and often very funny performance, miming to a music video,
showing pictures and talking, with no apparent relation between the
words and images, doing a bad talk about architecture, playing amplified
guitars to a plaster artwork in an attempt to make it crumble (which it
did, partly), and showing a super 8 film. And probably a few other
things I've forgotten. Cathy, Mark and I all really liked it, the
students hated it. I guess they probably hadn't ever seen anything like
it and had no idea what to make of it. I really liked the humour in it,
and they way they do things without rehearsing very much (at least
that's what Catriona told us beforehand) — there is the possibility of
it becoming quite painful or embarrassing for the performers and the
audience. Also of course I really liked the powerpoint presentation, as
I've spent some time working in offices and therefore have a long
history of hating Microsoft Office. Although when I first started, I
don't think it was called that. I used to work with Word Perfect and
various other versions of Word, I think that was before they invented
Microsoft Office. Also I've seen Powerpoint used on many other
occasions, including a training course on how to start your own business
which I went to in Berlin, which as far as I remember was a revolting
mix of Powerpoint aesthetics and marketing terminology. Arrrgh!

Other highlights of the Berlin trip include visiting Buero fuer
Film und Gestaltung, who talked in some detail about a few books they
designed for Olafur Eliasson; Colors and the Kids, who showed us moving
image work which was a very inspiring mix of very hands-on film (like
filming people's hands doing things) and very complex 3D computer
animation, and also great because of their very fearless use of colour.
Also the visit to Bongout in Torstrasse, who very kindly not only talked
to us about their gallery space but also opened up their studio next
door so we could see their screenprinting facilities. It is a rather
small space, and a lot of things are homemade as they had no budget for a
big professional studio. Great to see how you can do your own thing if
you have the right space and a bit of a DIY spirit.

One afternoon when I had nothing else on, for a change, I went to
Hamburger Bahnhof to look at some art. I'd looked up on their website
what was on and found they had an exhibition by Walton Ford, who
admittedly I'd never heard of before, but it looked really interesting —
large-scale paintings inspired by book illustrations of wild animals,
with text mounted next to them. Also Mark went to see it the day before
and he said (this was after I had a tutorial with him at Camberwell in
which I showed him my work in progress) that it was fantastic and I
really should go and see it, I suppose because a lot of animals feature
in my own work too. So I went to see it, and it was quite amazing. The
write-up it got was about how different the artist's practice was from a
lot of other contemporary art and how it seemed not the fashionable
thing to do and was therefore all the more amazing (this is written from
memory and totally reworded by me and possibly bears only little
relation to what it actually said, but this is how I remember it). I'm
not sure if that means anything and if it's true, but certainly I hadn't
seen anything like it, first of all it did remind me of book
illustrations, but the things were so huge that just their size was
astonishing, and it made me think that buying the catalogue would be
really pointless because reducing them so hugely to fit them inside a
book would really do them no favour at all. So, the first impression
was, these are really BIG. The second, they are beautifully painted, and
they have animals on them, which is always a good thing. Then, as you
take a closer look, you see there is text scribbled into the corners and
margins in pencil, sometimes so weak it's difficult to make out, which
makes you want to read it even more. I can't quite remember now what the
texts were, but they were different from the texts typed out and
mounted next to the images, which were excerpts from the original texts
that inspired the paintings, some of them from adventurers and
explorers. I remember at least one of the texts had a very striking
reference to the present, it might have been something about the
internet, which seemed curiously out of place when all the scenes
depicted in the paintings happened over 100 years ago. And then, of
course, you also realise as you read the texts displayed next to them,
that they are all quite terrible and sad, and what's worse, they are all
based on accounts of events that really happened. The delay of the
realisation what you were looking at is, I think, what made it so
intriguing: the first impression that you were looking at some beautiful painting,
and soon after the realisation that you were looking at something
grotesque, violent, cruel, or terribly sad, like one picture of a mob of
people burning a tree and two bear cubs falling off a branch, or a
panther escaped from a zoo in the foreground, and another mob of people
approaching far away with torches, hunting the cat. The longer I looked
at it, the more it upset me, and in the end I fled and looked at more
reassuring art by people like Donald Judd, Gordon Matta-Clark, Marcel
Broodthaers etc.

(That last bit about those artists being "more reassuring" was, of course, a joke.)

Posted 23 April 2010.

TEXT FOR THE BURRO STORY

I started writing the text for the Burro story. At first
I wasn't sure how to do it, I just knew I wanted it to be
in Spanish, and not in very good Spanish. So asking a native speaker to
translate it for me wasn't going to work, as the Spanish would have
been too good, and writing it myself using a dictionary would have been
not good enough. So I decided to write it in English and use a
machine translation. Perfect!

MORE BURRO, MORE MUEBLES!

I made some burro boxes last week and a sketch of the Burro scene in letterpress yesterday.

Posted 12 February 2010.

EL BURRO Y LOS MUEBLES

I did some work on El Burro y los Muebles. I grabbed some
pictures off the internet with landscapes, donkeys and furniture, and
collaged them together in Photoshop. With these, I wanted to try out
what sort of feeling I would get from just using pretty much the
first best images I could find, and I'm quite happy with the way
they turned out, they capture the sort of feeling I'm after. The next
plan is to make some really stupid webpages using found images of
burros, quite possibly with the burros and the muebles moving around.
I'll try to do that in Javascript or CSS if I can figure out how
to, or a flash animation if all else fails —although I'd rather not
because I don't believe in using flash on websites. (Maybe I should
add that I do all my own website stuff, despite the fact that
I don't know very much about making websites. I was shown a
bit by a friend who is a proper web designer, by which I mean not a
graphic designer but someone who makes websites, and I'm teaching
myself as I go along. The resulting website is obviously not very
graphic-designerish, and rather clunky, which is exactly what
I want. I consider making the website a part of my work, and
making some burro pages is part of the whole piece about the burro and
the muebles that I'm planning to do, not only as a way of collecting
ideas and preparing the more practical work but also a piece in its own
right.)

So here are the images that I just made. I chose pictures
with the search terms "Arizona landscape" and "mesa" because
I imagine the burro to be in some sort of fantasy landscape between
the Arizona of Max Ernst and Coconino Country as invented by George
Herriman.

Posted 31 January 2010.

SOME MORE REFLECTION

When I had my feedback tutorial with Finlay and Rebecca, it
was suggested that I need to be more aware of what other artists
are doing, and think about where I would like to be positioned in
the art world. Whether I want my work shown in galleries or in
other places, which artists I think my work should be shown
alongside with, etc. Several artists were mentioned whose work
I should look at, including some I knew about and some
I didn't: Helen Maurer, Sophie Lascelles, Bob Matthews, Mark
Harris, Rebecca Warren, Joseph Beuys, Marc Quinn, and specifically for
use of colour, Bridget Riley and Paul Gauguin.

So here is my terribly reductionist comment on each of them:

Helen Maurer: Yes

Sophie Lascelles: Yes

Bob Matthews: No

Mark Harris: hmmmmm...

Rebecca Warren: Yes

Joseph Beuys: Yes

Marc Quinn: No

Bridget Riley (colours): Yes

Paul Gauguin (colours): Yes

Posted 27 January 2010.

REFLECTION

At a recent group crit (late last year) some of my work was criticised — my letterpress books Constant Pain and 16 Murders and a Stonecutter
in particular. Criticism included some things I agreed with
(letterspacing wasn't great, it would have helped to spend more time on
them), some things I really didn't — particularly Garry's criticism
of my use of different fonts in Constant Pain — this is just
something that you can rely on hearing if there is a graphic designer in
the room, I think it is because that's what they teach you in
typography classes. But ACTUALLY it can look really good to mix up the
fonts, particularly when there is no particular reason to do everything
in the same font; and as all the bands named in the book are different,
I don't see any convincing reason why the fonts shouldn't be. Also
his comment about using different sizes of the same font on the cover of
16 Murders, which I did because I thought it looked
good that way. I still think it does. It is very common for people
to look at other people's art and say "Why didn't you do it this way?"
etc, and generally I think a very valid answer is "Because I'm not
you". Finlay also criticised the choice of colours for the cover of Constant Pain,
saying that it would have been better to make it look really solemn and
tasteful, i.e. with a black cover, or so outrageously garish and
horrible that you could see it was intentional. If any of those I'd go
for the latter, as after years of graphic design training and work,
I got really sick of slick, tasteful graphic design (hence my
decision to make my own website, and not use black text on a white
background EVER). And also I must say that I didn't really
agree with any criticism of the other book, 16 Murders; it is
exactly the book I wanted to make, and despite the fact that nobody
whatsoever commented on how well crafted it is, I'm quite proud of it,
as I can really see how my bookbinding skills have been developing
since I started working (irregularly) for Book Works and a book
restoration place last year.

I also showed a bronze sculpture in quite an unfinished state,
which Finlay liked best out of the whole lot (out of my work
I showed that day, I mean) — although it was in a very
unfinished state. It still is, it needs lots of filing and tidying up.
And there was the print I did for the box set we did last summer,
which I brought along because hardly anyone had seen it. Finlay's
criticism was that it was a promising start of something that
I hadn't taken any further. I admit that he has a point there.
To me it's not something that I've started and then abandoned, rather
I think I start lots of things and then start other things and
it takes me a while to get back to them. Sometimes it takes me a really
long time. On a 2-year MA I guess it would be better to be able to
concentrate on one thing and not let yourself get distracted by
something else you want to do, so I'll have to work on being more
focussed.

Then, we had another group crit (with Finlay and Rebecca Fortnum)
last week. Most of the discussion was about the whole exhibition itself,
the way it was hung, the decisionmaking involved in grouping things in a
certain way, etc. In the end, the two pieces that were singled out to
talk about included my framed version of the book 16 Murders.
Interestingly, I heard more positive than negative comments, Garry
and Dan liked it, two other people told me they thought it was the best
piece in the show (for whatever that's worth...) Rebecca said the fact
that it was difficult to read the words (partly because they're printed
in an awkward font in black on black paper, partly because the glass of
the frame was reflective) didn't put her off at all, she thought it just
made it more intriguing. Also she said it was very sculptural and
solemn-looking. Finlay pointed out that the day before, there were many
much more unkind comments, I can't exactly remember what they were
(and I wasn't there myself as I was ill) — but I believe there
were comments like "it's impossible to read, it looks very
self-important" etc. I think the fact that I like it and some
other people do too is enough for me; you can't please everybody.
I also think it probably helped that there wasn't a title on it —
for those people who weren't willing to give it a chance a title wasn't
necessary, and those who were were free to make their own
interpretation, rather than be influenced by my own. In the case of the
book, I called it 16 Murders and a Stonecutter because it has 16 band names ending in -cide
and one word, Lapicide, which I initially thought meant to kill hares,
but which turned out to mean 'stonecutter'. Finlay suggested that it
would have been much funnier if I had called it "Many band names end in
-cide". I do think that would have made a good title, but when I
saw people's reactions in the exhibition, I was glad the framed version
was untitled, because some of the people who liked it liked it in quite a
serious way. If the title had pointed out to them that it was a bit of a
joke, they would have seen it completely differently, and as it is, I'm
very happy that people read it in different ways. I hadn't thought
of it in any serious way at all, so I was particularly amused
about the comment that it looked very self-important; and I was
quite surprised (and happy) that some people saw it as something more
serious than I had intended it to be. Maybe if it needs a title it
should just be -CIDE. Or maybe it's better off without?

Posted 26 January 2010.

NEW WORK

This is a commissioned piece for a friend: she wanted me to make a
bat that carries a head, to accompany a story she wrote. The bat is much
more batlike than previous bats I've made. (He is based on the Grey
Long-Eared Bat, or Pletocus austriacus.) Now that he's finished, I want
to keep him! Note that the ears are complete with tragus (the tragus is
the pointy bit inside the ear). I'm pretty sure I'll reuse this bat for
one of my diorama ideas. Its feet are backed with velcro and the head is
knitted, so the bat can actually really carry the head.

Posted 24 January 2010.

LAPICIDE

This is a t-shirt design I made in December for the exhibition at
the Horse Hospital. It is an offshoot of my letterpress book which is a
collection of bands whose names end in -cide, Lapicide being a Finnish
all-female Black Metal band that I've made up. Lapicide to me sounds
like it means to kill hares, but actually it means STONECUTTER. Of
course the design is an homage to Bathory's fabulous t-shirt with the
name Bathory written in the same font (Old English) and the image of a
goat's head. When I talked to Savage Pencil at the show opening at the
Horse Hospital, he asked me if it was a reference to Bathory, and if I
was impressed that he'd noticed. Well, I was, but then to be honest I'd
expect nothing less. He is, after all, Savage Pencil. Funnily enough
this t-shirt didn't get any sort of reaction / recognition when I showed
it at a group crit in college. When I showed it at the Horse Hospital, a
few people thought it was fantastic, or at least very funny. I had been
warned that printed t-shirts are probably deemed lowest of the low in
art colleges, hehe... but to people who are into metal t-shirts they are
an art form. So there.

Posted 24 January 2010.

PHOTOS

At a batworker training day in December. The bat is permanently
damaged from an injury and is being looked after by a licensed
batworker. It was greedily eating mealworms. Click for more pictures.

My brother's pets. They are not axolotls but are
closely related to them. They are called Andersons Querzahnmolche in
German, Ambystoma andersoni in Latin, and Anderson's salamander in
English.

Another of my brother's pets. It is supposed to be able
to breed on its own, but I think it probably knows that its children
would end up being fed to other animals, so it's just sitting there on
its own refusing to produce offspring.

Posted 13 January 2010.

NEWS

Look at my news page for recent work, as I've been too busy with all kinds of work to update this page regularly.

Posted 08 December 2010.

DIAGRAM

Posted 26 July 2009.

READING

While trying to figure out what I'm going to write about in my research paper, I've been reading A year with swollen appendices
by Brian Eno (with which I haven't gotten very far) as well as several
books about the work of Marcel Broodthaers — and I came across this
rather nice quote by him:

Ce qui m'intéresse, c'est Ingres Ce n'est pas Cézanne et les pommes

Also on my current reading list is Simon Patterson's Rex Reason,
which I bought many many years ago, but I stupidly never
realised until recently that the original was done in letterpress — and High Noon. I'm also looking at lots of Art & Language books and reading Cory Arcangel's blog
which has a very intriguing entry from 4 March 2009 about Continuous
Partial Awareness, which he explains as something like multi–tasking,
with the difference that in Continuous Partial Awareness you are so
distracted by everything that you don't focus on anything at all.

Posted 24 July 2009.

CONSTANT PAIN

Just when I decided it's about time to put up pictures of my recent
books, I discovered that my digital camera is no longer working. So I
took pictures with my laptop's inbuilt camera instead. Of course the
quality is rubbish, and as for some bizarre reason the camera doesn't
take normal, but MIRROR IMAGE pictures, I had to un-mirror them in
photoshop.

So here is one of the books I've made, Constant Pain; a
collection of very silly band names. It is printed in letterpress, the
pages are black ink on white paper, the book is half bound in red
bookcloth and blue Canson paper with the title printed in silver ink,
also in letterpress.

Click on the photo to go on a tour through the whole book.

Posted 7 June 2009.

WHAT

has happened since my last entry? I've been a bit too preoccupied
recently to update this regularly. I finished my book of failed
etchings. Then I worked on etchings for a silly little book about
spiders which I wanted to be finished for the Minipresse book fair
in Mainz (21 - 24 May), but I couldn't finish them in time so made the
book with ink drawings instead. Then I made a letterpress book of
collected stupid band names, entitled Constant Pain, and a book called Alexandra
which was based on a book of drawings I made when I was 5 years old.
The original was made with a red felt tip pen, the new version is
screenprinted.

I feel like preparing for the book fair distracted me a bit from
other work I wanted to do, I was under so much time pressure to get all
the books finished that I didn't have time to make the big animal I
wanted to make. I still want to make it though.

The book fair was fairly successful, maybe not so much in financial
terms, but I got a mention in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, they
had a small article about the book fair which mentioned three exhibitors
by name, and I was one of them — not bad considering there were 360
exhibitors there in total!

Posted 31 May 2009.

BOOK

This is a book I made in preparation for the book of my terrible
etchings that I wanted to make this week (but can't, because the
letterpress studio is closed). I wanted to try out a Keith Smith binding
for single pages. It is similar to a coptic binding, the spine is a bit
loose though, so I'm not that happy with it — also I'm not entirely
sure about the rustic look of these kinds of binding, so I think for the
actual book I'm going to make sections of pages to do the letterpress
on, and tip on the printed pages. I hope it will work. Well, I'm pretty
sure it will, but I'm worried the spine will be rather thick.

Posted 17 February 2009.

READING WEEK

It is reading week. I intended to get on with making my book, but my attempts were foiled: I found the letterpress studio is closed until Friday. So I got some books out instead.

Lucy Lippard The Pink Glass Swan — Selected Feminist Essays on Art

Caroline Jones Machine in the Studio — Constructing the Postwar American Artist

They both look very interesting, and the Lucy Lippard one seems particularly relevant to my own work, with chapter titles like Making something from nothing (Toward a definition of women's "Hobby Art").

On a completely unrelated note, I just listened to Satanicpornocultshop's new uploads on Myspace, they are here: SATANICPORNOCULTSHOP. I love their cut-up madness, their terrible cover versions (like Kylie Minogue vs. Arabic Belly-dance Music) and the over-the-top happy creepy colourful collage artwork they put on their record covers.

Posted 16 February 2009.

WAG YOUR TAIL

I did a bit of birdwatching today in my lunchbreak — I was teaching
bookbinding to graphic design students in Kingston, and the university
is right next to the river, and there are lots of birds about. It made
me realise what a terrible birdwatcher I am. I WATCH the birds alright,
but mostly have no clue what they are. Or I hear them singing, but can't
spot them. I think the singing ones may have been wrens. I did see some
wrens too, but the ones I saw weren't singing, and I saw moorhens and
mallards and wood pigeons. And there was one rather interesting bird
that seemed to be building a nest in the middle of the stream, but of
course I didn't know what it was. I tried later to find it in the
Collins Bird Guide and "identified" it as a grey wagtail. It looked like
a white wagtail, but those are black and white, and this one was
yellow. Therefore I conclude it was the grey wagtail.

I don't know exactly how this is connected with my printmaking MA course, but I'm sure that it is. So there.

Posted 13 February 2009.

INTERJECTION

I'm currently sleeping in a bed where the bed-base is slightly
wider than the mattress. There is a thin old futon on the bedbase, and
on top of this, the mattress. So there is a strip of futon sticking out
from under the mattress, which for humans is just slightly too narrow to
sit on comfortably. My cat, however, can sit on it quite comfortably,
and sometimes does. I'm a bit envious, because it looks so comfortable,
but it isn't for me. And as I thought about this, I remembered that
Georges Perec wrote something about how cats inhabit spaces. It took me a
while to find it, but here it is: it's in section 4 of the chapter "The
Bedroom" in the book Species of Spaces and other pieces:

Placid small thought No. 1

Any cat-owner will rightly tell you that cats inhabit houses much
better than people do. Even in the most dreadfully square spaces, they
know how to find favourable corners.

Posted 13 February 2009.

MAKING A NEW BOOK

I met Velmoet yesterday to talk about working together (we are
going to bind the catalogues for a group of full-time printmakers who
want them for their final show), and she showed me two books she was
going to show in her crit. They were beautiful, quite small and
delicate. And although I had planned to do something completely
different this week (although I've already forgotten what that could
have been), this inspired me to make a book myself.

My idea was to take all my rather mediocre attempts at etching and
put them together in a book. I went to the Letterpress studio today
and wanted to start making it immediately, just to find that it needs
much more thinking about than I first thought. The paper
I used for the etchings is quite thick, and each print is on a
separate sheet. So do I make a Japanese binding? That would mean it
doesn't open very well, so do I make a crease near the sewing on
each page, so it can be opened a bit more easily? Or should
I consider a different binding altogether?

I have to figure all of this out before I start making any
more pages for it. But the basic idea is all there: I will make a
cover out of bookcloth, which is printed on with letterpress. The title
is: "If I were to show you my etchings, would you run away
screaming?" — although I have yet to decide if I want to put
that whole sentence on the front, or "If I were to show you my
etchings..." on the front, the rest on the back, or perhaps make a cover
where you have the first part on the front cover, then you open it and
find another cover that opens to the right which has the rest of the
sentence on it. Inside, there will be one page of text, then an image,
then text, then image etc. — but here I need to decide if
I add extra pages to print the text on, and have each page printed
only on the front, or if I'll just print the text on the back of the
failed etchings.

I want this to be a very quick project, partly because I have
so many long-term ideas and projects that are just dragging on and not
getting anywhere at the moment, so I thought it would be good to
stop worrying about them and make a few pieces of work very quickly. So
I hope to finish the book early next week.

It did not occur to me immediately, but I realised that this
idea may very well be directly inspired by a Joseph Beuys piece
I saw in the Pinakothek in Munich in January. There was a whole
room full of his works, and one piece was a little photo on the wall,
showing a sculpture that he had attempted to do which went badly wrong,
and it was crossed out. I didn't pay that much attention to it, my
boyfriend pointed it out — what a genius idea to document your failed
attempts and in the process making a new piece of work!

Posted 13 February 2009.

WORK IN PROGRESS

In Regent's Park, early January 2009. Click to find out more about this strange being.

Posted 12 February 2009.

WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING?

I haven't updated this in such a long time, I'm not sure where to
start now. I've been spending time in the etching room, trying out
hardground, softground, aquatint, with mixed results — nothing good
enough to bother putting on here just yet! So instead of writing about
my own work, I'll write a bit about that of others which I've seen
recently and found inspiring in one way or another...

In December I went to a Ray Harryhausen
book launch. I was glad I'd bought my ticket the week before, as it was
sold out on the evening — and imagine how happy I was sitting in a
crappy little lecture theatre surrounded by geeks and listening to Ray
Harryhausen's anecdotes about starting to make animations with his
father's help (his father made the armatures). And in the end I was so
starstruck that I bought a book (An animated life) and queued up
for half an hour to get it signed — mainly just so I could get close to
Mr. Harryhausen's desk, where he had one of the ORIGINAL SKELETONS FROM
JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS! It was very small, and very amazing. I'm glad I
went — Ray Harryhausen is 88 years old, and I don't know that there
will be many more opportunities to see him.

My Ray Harryhausen book now lives next to a book I got for
Christmas, it's written by Martin Auer and illustrated by Linda
Wolfsgruber, whose work I like very much (sadly it's not easily
available, her books are mostly published in Austria only and have to be
mail-ordered), it's called "Von den wilden Frauen"
("Of the wild women"), and it contains stories about a mythical tribe
of women called "die Saligen". They live on a mountain in rural Austria
and they come into people's houses at night and do housework for them.
When the people who live there notice someone's been coming and helping
them, they eventually leave money or some other form of payment for the
woman — and when she finds it, she goes away and never comes back.

The illustrations are done in different techniques, some etchings,
some ink drawings / gouache / watercolour (I'm guessing, as I'm not sure
how some of them are done) — there's something slightly menacing about
them, there are silhouettes of women, some human / animal hybrids, a
beautiful picture of two lynxes flying through the air, and lots of
creatures with horns. Goats, moths, cats, women, and one woman with a
bird's head. Pictures of bird-people always remind me of Loplop. I'm not
sure who depicted people with bird heads before Max Ernst did — of
course the Egyptians did, but apart from that I'm not sure what the
history of bird-people is, if there is one. (There is a story about Max
Ernst that I like: he had a pet bird when he was little — and then one
day his little sister was born, and the bird died. He thought it was her
fault, that the bird had to go because she arrived.)

In January I saw the Marcel Dzama exhibition
in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. It was rather small, but had
some good things in it: I particularly liked a little diorama with a
wounded bear lying on the ground, and lots of bats hovering above it,
watching over the injured bear.

As it was rather expensive to visit the Pinakothek, and you could
only get one ticket to see everything, I tried to see everything to
make it worthwhile — and the space is so huge, it took me ages to see
it all. One thing I liked was a handmade sketchbook that belonged to
Jackson Pollock — it was about 4"x12" in size, made of 40 sheets of
cream-coloured Japanese mulberry paper, bound in a type of Japanese
binding called Noble Binding (Koki Toji, apparently), and it had ink and
felt pen drawings.

There were also some pieces by Rosemarie Trockel that were good, machine-knitted Rorschach test pictures.

But now it's time to sleep.

Posted 12 February 2009.

A CALENDAR

This is a calendar I made recently. I had three drawings of cats
wearing masks, pretending to be other animals, that I made earlier this
year for my friend's wedding invitation. She had given me a list of
animals that were acceptable for her invitation, and she specifically
pointed out that she did not want any cats on it, as she is quite
obsessed with cats (just like me) and she thought having them on her
wedding invitation would be going one step too far. So I decided to
simultaneously follow her brief and completely ignore it by drawing cats
pretending to be other animals.

And as I liked them so much, I decided to make some more and make a calendar out of them. Click to see more.

Posted 29 November 2008.

MY NEW BLOG.

I'm going to attempt to write a blog accompanying my MA
Printmaking. This is my first entry, in which I have nothing in
particular to say other than this is the beginning of my new blog.